'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' or 'Old Spice and Wit'

It aired during the Superbowl, which in itself is a clever move, and has now become one of the most recognizable bits on youtube. Knowing full well that it's halftime in one of the nation's most watched sporting events, Old Spice clearly made a smart move. While 90% of the men in country have been shouting, jumping, fist pumping at the screen in a display of Neanderthalish fervor, the women in the country, who in most cases are also the purchasing authority for domestic goods, were treated to a game of their own.

The spot is clear in it's message: Ladies, when your man smells like a man, you get treated like a woman. Aside from being hilarious they become immediately highly effective.

Since launching its latest campaign with Mustafa, Old spice sales are up 107%. Look at that number again, now look at your profit margins, now look at that number again.
107%.

Pow. That's good marketing.

So it stands that sandwiched between pecs and sarcastic writing, is one of the most successful advertising campaigns I've seen hit the mainstream. In what has become a viral sensation, Isaiah Mustafa (whose name, by the way, screams manliness)delivers one of my favorite television performances since....

Bruce Campbell for Old Spice


More after the jump.....

Critics like Flufflers.

I like to pretend that I write for a living. I mean, it doesn’t pay my bills at all, but when people ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them about Smile for Camera first. While I by no means pretend to be an expert in music, I do listen to the stuff, and as a listener (and a writer), I publish out opinions and suggestions on music daily (and thank to Smile, have a surprisingly large number of people that actually pay attention to it). Whenever I make a post, I really try to make it so that I am offering something to my readers that will enrich their lives the way it has mine. Either it will make them smile, dance, or laugh, or maybe even lull them off into a sleep, there’s always a deep level of consideration and research with almost every song. I may not always go deep into an artist’s history or motives, but my ultimate goal is always to expose new music, music that may influence a new generation of musicians to create the next big thing.

Yet, it seems like a lot of the stuff that makes its way into my inbox, Soundcloud drop box, and Google reader, to be quite frank, is pure crap. And yet, the hype surrounding the artists that produce this crap is huge, and I cannot seem to figure out why. It’s been a sad evolution for music, I must admit; and lately I find myself more and more often clicking the “mark all items as read” button to avoid the rehash of material that I know is about to take place. It’s always the same artists, the same stories, the same sounds. The entire blogosphere has become a huge circle jerk of self obsession, and mutual masturbation.

Although I admit that I remain safely within the boundaries of musical genres that I really enjoy, I can’t help but noticed that variety and ingenuity have flown out the window as of late. Whatever Happened to Indie? Indie kids used to be untouchable, the next big fad since whatever the last movement before it was and the spanking new nightmare of many a parent. Indie was the culture for the elite, the clubber that got too cool for the uppity joints, the teenager just old enough to dance, young and lusting for hours of endless motion. Indie was all about ingenuity. Indie was not about the flash, the pizzazz, colors so bright they made day-glo jealous.
Fast forward 3 years and now it seems that everywhere you look someone’s acting ‘Indie’. But the term has undergone so much change and evolution that is has become saturated with meanings.

In the Mid 1980s ‘Indie’ was born as the shy, quiet, shiny new baby daughter of 60s garage, 70s punk, and 80s post punk (It was a complicated love triangle, poor Indie doesn’t know for sure who to call ‘daddy). Her Full name was Independent Rock, and as she grew up she became an angsty rebellious pre-pubescent girl. Soon, she was shaving and putting on Teen Spirit every morning before school. She noticed boys. As ‘Indie’ continued to mature, she began to think of her future. And the story becomes fuzzy.

To qualify as an ‘Indie’ band, used to be that one (or one’s band) had strict criteria to meet. One must a) not be signed by a major label, as in, independent. b) flaunt ideas that are cutting edge, untested, new and c) Sport a dirty, and unoriginally unique style that includes, but is not limited to: brides-maids dresses you purchased at a flea market, girl pants on guys, guy pants on girls, suspenders, sunglasses, bright colors, and anything that anyone from Kurt Cobain to Kanye West would wear to make it into the ‘not hot’ edition of US weekly.

The problem is that when ‘indie’ bands got signed they continued to be called ‘Indie’, confusing the heck out of a whole bunch of people. The meaning of ‘Indie’ changed; It was no longer a terms used to describe those that were independent from the man and unsigned; now, ‘Indie’ became more of a description of a sound, a style. Which would’ve fine if it had stopped there.
But, Little ‘Indie’ refused to stop; different and new were good things, but she always wanted to be more. Soon, she found herself leaving the guitar built home of her parents to venture in the land of the electronic. ‘Indie’ still noticed boys, only boys also noticed her, and soon she found herself being thrown around between them. Boys named electro, boys named dance, boys named rap, boys named design, they took her and used and made to love to her as they pleased.

From these trysts we’re given the many meaning of ‘Indie’ now. The problem is, there are now so many of these ‘meanings’, so many interpretations, ideas, and stupid stigmas about what ‘Indie’ is, that it’s become hard to find any value in anything that is produced under the moniker. What Indie was, was something amazing, virginal, pure, untouched and untarnished by the hands of the mainstream. Now you turn on your tele, and Indie is on MTV, in her patent leather high heels, her purple tights and long off the shoulder black dress with a metallic tiger print on the front. Her big, plastic, purple hoop earrings are lost in her disheveled, intentionally messy hair. She stares at the screen in eyes lidded in hot pink shadow and says “love me”.
The influx of what we call Indie has led to a specific and very urgent situation: what was once supposed to be a pool of raw, untouched talent has become a nest of repetitious, recycled sounds. Artists are picked up by blogs so early that their hype swells and deflates long before their record is ever released, and those that survive are constantly pressured with producing more music, much faster than artists have ever had to do in the past. As a result, there is not much that can be called new coming from bands we label “Indie”. It’s almost as if they’ve gotten overwhelmed, lost their confidence, or they don’t know who to be.

While the Indie phenomenon is nothing new when you consider that every generation has a ‘movement’, what is new is how we approach the music. When I first started writing this article, which was over a year ago now, we were making leaps and bounds towards new forms of Electronic Indie music, but what I failed to notice, is that we re also making leaps in bounds in the facilitation of communication.

Armed with this new realization, and with great insight, I find now, the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for over a year since I started pondering on the subject, “What the hell happened to our music?” In an article called “Indie will Eat Itself” written for pitchfork Nitsuh Abebe writes:

“People who dislike things should say so, and any artist who puts out a record should be prepared for the fact that not everyone will love it. This is just life, and there’s no good alternative to it: Scenes in which every artist is uncritically considered a special, fragile snowflake tend to get really cruddy really quickly. But when you get to the point where you’re wary of any band that seems to think it’s actually doing something cool— even when that act’s only gotten as far as selling a couple of hundred singles— you’re halfway to kneecapping any opportunity for bands to actually be cool. So whenever I hear complaints about new indie acts being predictable, bland, overly tasteful, or unambitious, I can’t help thinking this might be part of the reason: That this scene may have started producing music the way some adolescents get dressed, corrosively self-conscious about any sign of unfashionable difference that opens them up to be mocked. At worst, you can wind up with a whole genre where the acts and the audience are both armoring themselves against standing out or embracing risks. You wind up reaching that weird provincial point where you’re always cutting down the plant that grows higher than the others— where the way you call for the music to be more interesting (or try to express what makes you more interesting) actually has the effect of making it tamer, less interesting.” (Nitsuh Abebe “Why We Fight: Why We Fight #1”)

Holy. Shit.

Abebe’s argument supports a crucial point: we need critics that actually criticize, as opposed to trying to please artists by writing fluff without any insight. Criticism is supposed to help artists grow, which in turn elevates the quality of the music in any scene. Instead we’ve become distracted with the flash of all it and forgotten what music discussion was actually about: discussing music, not artists.

In a genre so saturated with new music releasing daily, we simply cannot allow (or even afford) substandard music to be hyped to national notoriety, less we be content with the eventual death of a big chunk of modern culture. We need press that makes artists think about what they’re actually offering, as opposed to painting every new sensation as a “unicorn-riding medieval fantasy”. This is not porn, and we are not fluffers. Our goal should not be to make all artists look big in the bright lights, but to pick and choose the ones that will proudly represent the state of things under the spotlight. We need to give musicians a chance to change, to evolve, and that means pointing out their shortcomings and errors, not just their outfits and sex partners.
If we were look at our industry as if it were an episode of American Idol (competition episode, not decision night), we all need to be more like Simon Cowell, and less like Paula Abdul. Otherwise, there’s no where to go from here, but downhill.

Random Writing on Tumblr Reblogs

My tumblr gets the crap that doesn't fit anywhere. Because there are far too many vast lands to explore on the internets, and I'm the souvenir type. Way to go Me.

Anyways, this photo showed up in my dashboard:


via brokenmachine:ceasingtolovereality: papertissue
and I, for some reason, wrote the following:


God, isn't that true.

An Aside: It's not often that I actually have a reaction to one of these photos that I reblog. Occasionally i think, "wow, that's amazing, that's absolutely beautiful" or "man, something about this photo just irks me in the right way", but its not often that I come across a photo that I look at, and swell up.
/Over.

Background: I'm moving. Pretty much everyone knows I'm moving, but what are we leaving behind to do so? It's not something I often want to think about. I mean you always want to look into the future, we look forward by default, forward to what's going to come, forward to a place where we can make up beautiful realities that may or may never exist at all.
I saw this photo, and instead of thinking: "Oh, how pretty" my thought process went something like this*: "a thumbtack, I mean how simple...Who doesn't have that. On a map, makes sense, I mean, where else would a thumbtack be aside from a map, or a corkboard. This is not a corkboard. This is a map, and thumbtacks on a map usually show places you have been, the locations of branches you have grown, traces of you left behind. Look at all those thumbtacks in the distance, each one, a reminder, that something you loved is still living in that place. I began to wonder how that person must feel, that loved one left behind, shoved, nay, buried and pinched under the tip of some office miscellanea, torn to shreds between an aluminum point and a plaster wall. How sad, how utterly heartbreaking to think that moving, and starting over means that you have to leave something behind, to tear it apart, to forget it a little. Because, I mean, come on, how are you supposed to "start over" if you don't actually "start". I mean, then; at that point, you're just left with "over", and "over" is not a 'start', its not a 'beginning', its not a 'go'; "Over" is a 'done', an 'end'."**

That got me thinking. When I go, when I finally get there, there are literally a thousand different potential outcomes, each with their own heartaches and growing pains, but each with the same thing left behind.
So how do you know? how do you if you're absolutely supposed to let go? How do you know what to hold onto? How do you know you're not making the wrong choice?


*A thought process? an entire thought process in a paragraph. It seems very presumptuous to assume that you could actually accurately describe a thought process in one paragraph, even in one book, in a tome, in any form of writing, really. Thoughts are fleeting and the processes that bring them to us are troublesome and difficult to understand. I guess I wrote this one out because it struck me, and as such, has stuck with me.

**Although I referred to this as a 'process' I think, in reality, its more of a breakdown. My breakdown, maybe. Emotionally, immediately? Unlikely. It takes too long for the feeling I have to directly manifest themselves as words on this machine. By then, my fingers have had the time to learn to censor what you ultimately see, they've coated everything in pretty language and flowery images. Is it wrong?
But I guess what I actually meant, was a breakdown of a photograph. Which is way way simpler than analyzing my emotional problems.
-M

Offbeat Ads: Gummy Bear on a Stick

Just look at that man's face. The expression of pure peace and joy is priceless. The thought of the stomach ache he's going to have when he's done bring me a similar feeling.

It Gets Better and Better: Your Television, now in 3-D

Facebook is mostly a way to pass the time between idyll moments of thought. It serves as a distraction, mostly, but on occasion, you come across some tiny morsel of information that really gets your gears moving.

Recently I was on vacation in El Salvador with my father, where I watched Avatar in 3-d (with subtitles, of course) with him and some of his friends. After the movie, my father and I lingered outside waiting for the group to rejoin and discussed the awesome that was that movie presented in 3-d.

Today, rummaging around facebook, I across this heading: "ESPN to launch 3D network in June"

Okay, welcome to the future. Starting in June ESPN is going to be bringing 3-d into your home. How? Well, simple. Remember those nifty 3d glasses that you wore to watch Chicken Little and Avatar? You're gonna need to bust those out. And you know that huge plasma tv you just bought yourself for Christmas? Well you re gonna need to toss that, and buy yourself a better one.

That's a fairly large investment for a recession ridden country, not including the cost of programming, additional hardware and replacement glasses over the months. The challenge to broadcasters will be cost effectiveness. Paul Liao, CEO of the CableLabs consortium of cable operators, says that while 3D movies are paramount to the success of 3D in the home, live sports "will engage the consumer to a degree that has been unprecedented." But the channel plans on being "off-air" when one of the 81 3-d events for 2010 aren't on the air, which doesn't exactly scream 'value-added'.

The rest of the above-mentioned facebook article goes on to say:

Broadcasting live events in 3D comes at an extra cost. Locations where cameras are placed to capture a regular high-definition sporting event don't necessarily translate to a 3D broadcast. If simultaneously broadcasting in regular HD, ESPN needs to employ a second production crew, and different announcers, for the 3D telecast.

ESPN, which is part of Disney, has been testing 3D for more than two years.

In September, it produced the University of Southern California vs. Ohio State football game in 3D, shown on the USC campus and in theaters in Ohio, Texas and Connecticut. In surveys afterward, most viewers said they were "wowed." But some said quick camera changes "were a little hard on the eyes." And the research suggested that willingness to pay for 3D was "extremely dependent on (the) matchup."

"We don't have all the answers," says Chuck Pagano, ESPN's executive vice president for technology. "We asked the same questions back in the HD days. Is this going to be better? Is this going to be worse?"

ESPN likely won't have the 3D stage to itself. The HD Guru3D website reports that DirecTV will launch a 3D channel at CES. Robert Mercer, a spokesman for the satellite provider, wouldn't confirm that. But he says "3D is something we are very interested in."

All in all its forward movement. Although I'm saving my money for hologram TV